Microsoft FUSE Labs just released a brand new project – called the “CompanyCrowd”. This new research project is aimed at businesses or individuals which helps them easily aggregate social and media content from around the internet about a particular company or topic they’re interested in. Below is a description from the official project page:

CompanyCrowd automatically collects stories, media, and social content to create a living newspaper about the companies that are most important to you and your business. It’s fast, easy, and crowd-curated.

CompanyCrowd makes this easy by first finding all the social data into one search index and then leverages the wisdom of the crowd to curate the right topics, experts, and personalities for the company or product in question.

We gave CompanyCrowd a try, and while it is primarily aimed at businesses, it works perfectly fine for individuals as well who may be interested in a particular business or topic. All you need to do is to create page for the business or topic you want to follow, and then share this page with others using Facebook or other means. Everyone else are then able to join and contribute to this page by adding more search terms, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, RSS feeds, or thumbnails relevant to the business or topic. CompanyCrowd will then automatically update the page with relevant content from around the web.

The page you created will contain a feed of news articles around the web, videos, slideshow of photos, live Twitter feeds, as well as FUSE Lab’s own SocialGadget which tracks how well the topic is trending. To be honest, the page looks very similar to another FUSE Labs project called Montage, the only difference being with CompanyCrowd, other users are able to contribute towards the page you created, and the relevant results are based on more than just search terms.

In related news, it appears that FUSE Lab’s Project Emporia had recently been graduated from the research lab, possibly moved on to another product team or spinned off into something else. Let’s hope the the project had provided useful results for FUSE Labs to create something bigger and better!